In our talk with the Denton library board a few months ago, we discussed exactly this problem. We advocated for municipally run, federated social media. If every city was running a Mastodon instance right now, we would be having a different conversation entirely.
Fully hosted setups such as https://masto.host only require non-technical moderation. These solutions cost as little as five cents per user per month. Coupled with library quality placemaking, we could finally establish a virtual commons worthy of the investment.
Building out municipally federating social media infrastructure would solve the Elon problem while also dealing with several Fediverse downsides. Most of those downsides are social, not technical, in origin - poor moderation, instance implosions, unassisted learning curves, lacking network effect, etc. This could be easily solved by public investment and stewardship.
Social media is public information infrastructure. A huge part of our society's epistemic crisis is that we are leaving many people's primary access to information in the hands of the very people who most benefit from them being misinformed. We can solve that for pennies a month.
For most of us, the climate crisis already seems like an overwhelming, unmanageable emergency. But if we stop and look at the full scope of what is happening to our planet, we can see not only the social problems beneath these crises, but also some hints at solutions. The sheer grandiosity of all these systems in relation to each other, their evolution over eons, the layers of hidden potencies and vulnerabilities, can give us some much-needed perspective.
In the face of this ancient and magnificent system of which we are inextricably a part, conventions like national borders, capital accumulation, and even government authority seem ridiculous and untenable. We realize the impermanence of these hierarchies, their self-terminating antagonism to life itself. We recognize that in standing up against this horrific machine, we are doing the work of life itself, acting in continuity with those billions of years of yearning and becoming. When we resist the march of death, disconnection, and dispossession, we affirm the fact that we are nature defending itself.
May all our collective work be illuminated by this knowledge. May every step be an affirmation of that cosmic yearning. May we continue to fight from every angle, with every tool at our disposal, until mass exploitation and destruction are nothing but a memory. https://instagr.am/p/C69ad6FvBEu/
Cooperation Denton (TX)